Jumo – This website is simply amazing. It has cleverly combined the world of NGO/NPOs with the social network sphere, making it the best ‘follow your cause’ venue currently on the Web. In simpler terms, Jumo “makes it easy for you to find, follow, and support the issues and organizations that are important to you.”

Once you’ve signed up via Facebook, the Jumo platform asks you to select your areas of interest (such as human rights, environment and animals, poverty, art & culture, etc.). Next, based on your location, the Jumo system showcases nine different organizations and causes for you to follow in each of your chosen fields. See it here:

When you’re done, you’re taken to Jumo’s silverlining page: a Facbook profile-like page, customized according to your preferences, displaying important news and updates -feeds, really- relevant to your profile, plus suggested causes and organizations to follow. It looks amazing, includes content I’d actually like to read and it’s all for a good purpose. Hooray Jumo!

Google eBookstore – Although this new feature by the search giant still exhibits some major hiccups (specialty book lists are lacking content, such as the NY Bestsellers list, perhaps due to location constraints), this new service by Google is a commendable effort.

Despite the eBookstore’s limited availability of free books compared to its large number of paid books offered, the cherry on top of Google’s library/bookstore  is the eBook reader interface. This makes the reading of any book virtually as enjoyable as reading the actual physical copy on an indulgently soft armchair by a warm fireplace. The screen shot below shows the ‘Best Free’ eBook list, and the lower screen shot displays the reader platform in action using Jane Austen’s globally renowned Pride and Prejudice. Obviously, this service’s magnitude connects us, the users with pretty much every book ever written. I only wonder what Amazon.com has to say about Google’s eBookstore…

Google Hotpot – If you’re already familiar with Foursquare, the Google Hotpot service offers the same underlining service concept -social networking with friends based on geo-location and business ratings- only it does it much, much better. Google has exceeded Foursquare’s service in every possible way, thanks to a large scale combination of the various Google tools; maps and street view, altitude, and search (including images, user reviews, related articles and loads more ) all come into play to offer an ultra geo-location service.

The end result is an all-you-could-possibly-need geo-location service, aimed mostly at the wine & dine aspect of entertainment (search restaurants, diners, cafes, etc.). You can see the screen shot below of the restaurant search I did, ending up with the Spotted Pig, a British restaurant in the West Village neighborhood of NYC. You will see how one page includes all the basic information (phone number, map and driving directions, menu), BUT there are also photos of the restaurant and its dishes (including a street-view), actual reviews of former guests of the restaurant, a list of related places and more formal, critic-based restaurant reviews.

I didn’t stop at the Hotpot’s eating-related business search and looked for cool museums to visit in San Francisco. Did Google Hotpot live up to my expectation? Oh yeah.

Just think of this service’s extreme usefulness in the mobile context. You could search for practically any kind of business or entertainment venue near you in real-time, in a matter of minutes, see what bistros your friends have been to and recommend others to visit as well, how to get there, even what to order. As expected, this is another phenomenal service by Google.

Totally Cool Pix – The Weekly Blog winner from earlier this month made it to last week’s Weekly Faves collection, and for an evidently good reason. Totally Cool Pix is an amazing resource of phenomenal photography, capturing compelling, surprising and inspiring photos from around the world showing current affairs and news in image form. The anonymous creators of Totally Cool Pix select only the absolute best photographs out there, offering semi-professionals to submit their work in exchange for $100-$150, and proper credit on the site.

To explore the visual wonders of Totally Cool Pix, I suggest starting with the two photo galleries, Top Pictures of 2010 Part 1 and Part 2. Please note that some photos show graphic images of real people, but then again, the true power of story telling often entails such depictions. Below I have included a beautiful photo* by Adam Hunger I found on Totally Cool Pix which he had taken for Reuters, showing what Black Friday was like for many of Americans last month.

*The photo has been re-sized to fit the dimensions of this blog. To see its original size and annotation, please click here.

Academia.edu – This marriage between academic research and social networking is a didactic match made in heaven.  Academia.edu allows academics all over the world to “follow the latest research in their field.” Once you have created your own profile (it’s free!), you can invite your colleagues over, decide which researchers you would like to follow, upload papers you have published, lectures you have given, even posts and status updates you have posted.

When you think about it, Academia.edu’s added value is huge: the free service allows each researcher (regardless of rank) to create their own web page listing all of their material. The viewing and downloads of these, along with key search words people use online to search for any researcher can be tracked via Academia.edu’s system. This is phenomenal and all for a great cause: sharing and expanding the dialogue of research all over. Great job, Academia.edu team! I’ve created an account based on my B.A. major, Anthropology. Here’s a screen shot of it.

Daily Infographic -The sharp rise of infogrpahics (short for information graphics) attests to the growing trend of consuming complicated data in a visual way, which makes the understanding part both fast and more memorable, as opposed to simple numerical statistics. Infographics are particular handy when it comes to complex processes (such as financial, geo-political scenarios, etc.). Daily Infographic vows to post an interesting infographic every day, and they certainly keep that promise.

What kind of infographics will you find on this Weekly Blog winner? See the two interesting posts below, 16 Facts About Sleep and Colors of the Web. Enjoy.

GeoEye – Here’s how GeoEye describe themselves: “GeoEye, Inc. is a premier provider of superior satellite and aerial imagery, location information products and image processing services. Our products and services enable timely, accurate and accessible location intelligence that translates into timely and vital insights for our customers, anywhere and at any time.”

Although this sounds very corporate-y, it’s super cool to know the GeoEye uses an actual satellite to take these amazing pictures. I’d just skip right to the website’s gallery section (over 100 amazing images!) and then you’ll understand why GeoEye is so great at what it does. I’ve included two images that blew me away: Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Africa, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. I highly recommend reading the annotation accompanying each image. Click the images and you’ll get their respective page plus annotation.

Can you draw the Internet? – Who do you think has a greater chance of creatively showing what the Internet represents – a talented graphic designer or a 10 year-old kid who has never known a world without computers and the Internet? This intriguing project by Saint (London) brought out some amazing creative metaphors children have in their mind about what the Internet means for them.

The result? It will blow you away. Here’s a screen shot of the project’s homepage. Explore the unexpected and mind-blowing interpretations, and vote for your favorites!

Fluent in 3 Months – Meet the magical website of Benny Lewis, a delightful Irishman promising to let you in on the all the language hacks out there so you can master language fluency in no time. The content you will find on Fluent in 3 Months is based on hardcore, firsthand experience: Benny was out traveling the world for seven years, meeting various nations, cultures and languages along the way.

Before he set out to his worldwide experience, Benny spoke only one language: English. This is a nice reassurance that learning a new language is more than possible, well after one’s school days are over. Fluent in 3 Months was a winner Weekly Blog, hence its Weekly Fave position. So go ahead and enjoy discovering a new language, and I suggest starting with Benny’s Language Hacking Guide. By the way, if you’re interested in additional language learning resources, check out our Language faveline on the Education page.

Summify – Readers accounts (such as Google Reader, Netvibes, etc.) are a great way to stay connected with news and updates of all your blog subscriptions or RSS. But when you add all your Facebook friends’ feeds and Twitter updates, all that information can be overwhelming and time consuming. Summify is here to break it down for you, allowing you to focus on the ‘more important’ updates, leaving out the trivial ones.

How does it do it? Generally speaking, Summify identifies the most shared and discussed items within your areas of interest, and makes these top priority. I took Summify for a test run and was impressed. See the screen shot below of my Summify page based on my Google Reader account. See the video below for an animated explanation of what Summify is all about.

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine – I wonder what the Web looked like 5 years ago. Can you even remember? If you try to by memory, prepare yourself for futility; technological advancements of the Internet happened and still occur today so fast and seamlessly, the entire Web feels like an organic creature that is growing before our very eyes.

Thankfully we have the Wayback Machine, an archive project by archive.org, which lets you see what web pages looked like, beginning from 1996 and up until a few months ago. Although the most interesting websites are conveniently blocked (try looking up Facebook or Twitter for example), or only partially represented in the archive, here are two fun examples:

allmyfaves.com. December 2006:

CNN.com, Feb 2003:

Looks funny, doesn’t it? Let the fun linger on with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Give it a try yourself and look for the old pages of your favorite website. Simply type in the url in the search box and hit the “Take Me Back” button. Let the magic begin…

Brain Pickings – One of the two winning Weekly Blogs, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings is a sophisticated venue of intelligence and bite-size horizon enhancers, offering a regularly updated collection of “curated bits of culture that will, at the very least, introduce you to new ideas and perspectives and, at their very best, help you think more, laugh more, create more.”

Brain Pickings is all about enticing your neurons by providing you with well written posts covering out of the box cultural ideas and art projects, among others. Read the fascinating post about the Sounds of HIV as an example (the player below was included in the post, playing those mysterious Sounds of HIV).